Before we start, here’s Wrath after he attempted to wear some kind of freebie weapon and it ate his head. Apparently, the glowing blue robin’s egg of death needs to be rezzed on the ground, not attached to your body. I actually think the look is good, and may adopt it for the next blogger gathering, depending on the theme.

But enough of that. This week: freebies! We’re looking at free weaponry because, hey, not everyone can afford to shell out L$1,000 every time some new orbiter hits the scene, or risk becoming a social pariah because they spent their hair allowance on a stunningly detailed PPK rather than the requisite latest flexi-sculptie mane from Naughty. Besides, it’s important to know your cheap arsenal for those times when you really need to drop an anvil on your lover’s head, or push that stalker two sims away because he won’t leave you alone after you politely thank him when he comments on how good your ass looks in those jeans.

And we’ll be back right after the commercial. Please click “more” for continued nonsense.

Where do you find freebie weapons? First off, if you’ve ever picked up a big smorgasbord of free stuff in some freebie box with 500 assorted pieces of crap, look through your objects folder. I know, just the though of clicking on that folder gives you a panic attack, but do it, and while you’re at it, make a new folder called “weapons” and start sorting the junk drawer of your inventory. You don’t want to have to hunt through a gigantic list of free drinks and dancing cow attachments in a moment of crisis.

If you didn’t find anything you like in your inventory, you can add to your free arsenal the same way you find other free shit–search “freebie” in the SL search engine (that blue button labeled “search” at the bottom of your viewer) and start trolling through the big dumps. Freebie Warehouse (slURL) usually has a box or two lying around, and in most boxes marked weapons you’ll find one or two of the things I mention in this post.

After Wrath and I went through our vast inventories trying out every free weapon on each other (a great way to spend an evening) we came to a similar conclusion. Most free Second Life weapons suck. They either aren’t as funny as they attempt to be (god, I know that feeling) or they just plain don’t do anything. And let’s get something straight, a replica of a gun that won’t let you go into mouselook and make noise, shoot something, or push the heck out of your target is not a weapon, it’s a prop that is barely useful for roleplay.

Of the three cool weapons we found in our inventories, the first was the pumpkin bomb. This little Halloween nasty gets mention for a few reasons. First, it’s funny. Who doesn’t enjoy an exploding pumpkin? Okay, Torley would prefer a watermelon, but everyone else would be just as happy with the orange version. Second, it works. It either pushes your adversary a sim away or sends him or her into low orbit with a satisfying bang. Nothing a catastrophic, but nicely effective. A useful feature is that the pumpkin seeks the closest av target after you rez it in the vicinity, so you don’t have to be too accurate. But be careful in crowds, because then it’s wildly inaccurate. (Sorry about that Orchid. . .) Also, if your opponent is wearing a shield, it may just stick to the shield and harmlessly detonate away from your target. Below is a shot of Wrath at just such a moment. You can see if he didn’t have his shield on it would have blown his head off. The pic is crappy with heat distortion because I’m a ninny and stood back about 100 meters.

The next item of value was the scatter popgun. It looks silly, fires a whole ton of little yellow balls at your target, makes a ridiculous popping noise, then pushes the target straight up a few hundred meters. Wrath did a great job of opening a parachute and landing gracefully while the rest of us stood around hoping to see a mess on the planking when he hit the ground. Notice me, DesertWolf, and Orchid below waiting for Wrath’s demise and wondering if the little yellow balls will de-rez or need to be cleaned up. They disappeared after a minute. Thanks, kind weapons scripter! This is a great party weapon, and it gets your point across.

I’ll leave you with one last tidbit about something you may already have in your free arsenal–jwoulf’s RPG launcher. I love this one. It looks reasonably like the real thing, has a nice smoke anim that trails the projectile, and it pushes your target several sims away. I like to use it on Myg when she gets too rowdy with jadz0r’s tagger or the fart gun. And you’ll just have to wait until next week to read about those, because they aren’t free and we’re out of time.

For each test, one blog will take the offensive perspective, the other the defensive. This week, Wrath lost the vicious rock, paper, scissors match (can we get that for SL? Please, some savvy scripter…) and had to play catcher. Actually, he lost because he volunteered me for Vint’s mantourage without asking. Not that I’m actually complaining, mind you.

Here we are at the bonfire party in Wrath’s backyard. This pic is taken just after the completion of the weapons test (note shirtless triumphant male behavior) and just before we had wild two-on-one sex with an extremely hawt elf who couldn’t keep her clothes on. Good thing she was there to cover any homoeroticism. Read on for the actual useful information about one of the ultimate orbit weapons, The Fixer. Sorry folks, no more sex in this post, just violence.

This week we focus on The Fixer, an evil little tool from Armory Overstock (Shepherd, 102, 19, 107), carriers of one of Second Life’s widest selections of scripted weapons. The Fixer is a simple and effective orbiter. We were drawn to it because Jacqueline from Armory Overstock said that its attacks will not register on the push/bumps log of the target avatar.

It’s advertised as a “push buster” so of course we tested it on push-restricted land. According to the notecard, it doesn’t work as well on push-enabled land. Go figure. The Fixer is a specific tool for specific jobs.

First off, this is exceedingly simple to use. You just wear it and then say “orbit {avatar name}” and bye bye target. Wrath was pushed more than two billion meters straight up and had to relog to get out of the orbit bubble. You read that right: two billion meters. You can even abbreviate the av’s first name and it will work–just make sure there aren’t two avs with similar names or it may backfire, i.e. “orbit Wra” when you’re standing near Wrath and Wraith.

That’s Wrath (above), moments before flying billions of meters into space without protective gear.

Pros: The simplicity and the fact that pushes/bumps aren’t registered, and the fact that it works on push-restricted land. I’m not advocating anything against the TOS, but I do love a good hack. It does not show on your avatar (except as a mouth attachment when view invisible is enabled), so you can wear it in polite company. There are also, thankfully, no noticeable lag or movement problems. The orbit bubble will stay with a seated av until the av stands, whereupon the orbiting commences. Note gray orbit bubble below:

Cons: Despite the fact that pushes and bumps don’t register, it’s not a discreet weapon. A gray orbit bubble rezzes around the target. Furthermore, it doesn’t work on a silent channel. You have to be within chat range to use and the target av will see/hear the orbit command.

Compare this to the orbiter on the Omicron weapons system, which does not show an orbit bubble and is completely HUD controlled–no chat command–but which does show up on the pushes/bumps list and you have a perfect six-of-one, half-a-dozen-of-the-other situation. Pricewise, The Fixer is $975, exactly half of the cost of the Omicron. While the Omicron handles a plethora of security needs, The Fixer only does one thing. I’d say this orbiter cuts a bit deep into the wallet. But if it had a channel command line and an invisible bubble, I’d say it was a total steal.

In terms of bugs, it has neither the lag and reset trouble I’ve found with the Omicron, nor the cage-before-orbit necessity of Yorick’s Multifool. It did miss once, rezzing an orbit bubble around empty space and leaving me vulnerable to Wrath’s counterattack, and it pushed me every time I used it–about ten meters–visible to Wrath and Sable (who was along to provide third-person perspective).

Verdict: A somewhat expensive but effective and powerful orbiter, with some stealth capability in the hands of a savvy user.

The Fixer – push-restriction busting no push/bump registering orbiter
Price: L$975
Armory Overstock
Disclosures: Seen in world: Yes | Review copy: No | Friends List: No